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Long Shots

I love long shots. I love broken down 47-1 thoroughbreds that you could time with a speed dial, penny stocks that might cure cancer and ancient off off off broadway actors that catch that one lightning in the bottle role they were born for. I love red faced fat guys struggling against the years of a sweet tooth at the back of the marathon pack and the limpers that continue into the dark long after the lights and finish line have returned to anonymous cracked pavement. There has never really been anything to love about smart money though. Nothing but the margin is ever risked. Those favorites have already won favor. They are the short odds and sure things. The safe play. Nothing miraculous there ever. But the long shots are the ones that should fail. The ones that carry some essential flaw at their core. They are the Army of Too. They’re the too slow, too short, the too foolish believers. They listen their whole lives to the critics, then let the catcalls find their way into backbones but never their hearts. Perfect it turns out is almost never the same as true. Said another way the truth about us all is in the imperfection. That's why I can’t stand to listen to some 7 year old piano protege play letter perfect Bach. Its why I listen instead for the humanity in a singer. Something only feels true if it rises between the sharps and flats, reaching up past all they've endured through their voice and into the air. Great art always exposes the human heart beating against its own flaws. A long shot made noble by the attempt. I like day old roses, not because they’re beautiful forever, but because they’re not. I like people with scars they can't hide instead of perfect complexions they advertise. I like gamblers that throw everything away trying to reach some luck they know doesnt exist. I like the lottery players of love in weekend bars betting against the favorite, loneliness. I like the “this is the last shot ever” drunks vowing against all odds to become clear. I like little kids that confess they lied about their father being a hero. And I love three legged dogs that keep trying to run. In short I love the brave. The take it on the chin guys. The single mons that dead lift 500 pound worry for their kids in a thousand tender ways. I knew an immigrant cab driver years ago. A 'just off the boat, barely speak english' migrant that is so fashionable to hate these days. He worked 80 hours, nights and weekends, driving over the Manhattan streets until it tattooed his spine, like a fractured map to the promised land. He somehow put his little girl through City College. Later she got a scholarship to some Ivy League school. Became a lawyer. Not the Park Avenue pad the hourly rate board room kind. She works the tenant courts, evictions and landlords trying to cash in going condo. Fighting the rising tide of avarice and cruelty. It's a hard thing to understand until you see it. Then it's as unmistakable as dawn. She doesnt just seek justice. She is it. It found it's way into her through the usual side streets of struggle and character. She carries it in herself. She’ll be a judge someday. Her father, after decades of 80 hour weeks, became a bent in half old man. He carries the thing that made his daughter just. He carries the price of sacrifice. But that common kind of bravery has a kind of weight. It is the willing price that he offered. It is that price that exposes the truth about sacrifice and love and then its great reward. Justice smiling up at you from the eyes of your grown little girl. The last time I saw him we talked a minute and I watched as he limped away. Among all the ramrod straight line declarations of ambition and speed he looked to me like he had become a human question mark. Bent by sacrifice, and moving as slow as the truth. I wanted to tell him if he still ever asks about the how and why of this life that the answer is in the mirror. Waiting with all the other glorious unlikely long shots. Swinging away at the odds. Yesterday Mystik Dan won the Kentucky Derby. 18-1 winner. By a nose. WLM Long Shots

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